May Day

May Day is the ancestral hinge between the Taltos and the Mayfair family: a May Day celebration preceded the union of an Earl and a woman of the glen, and their descendants carried Taltos genes into a family that would become a colonial dynasty. The recollection makes a seasonal celebration part of a long history of migration, interbreeding, inheritance, and concealed ancestry.

The Ancestral Union

The account places the beginning of the Mayfair lineage three generations after a May Day orgy gave way to a misalliance between an Earl and a common woman from the glen. The union’s significance lies less in the celebration itself than in its consequence: Taltos genes passed through their descendants to the family that later established itself first on Saint-Domingue and then in Louisiana.

This lineage belongs to a wider history of contact between humans and Taltos. Humans reached the British Isles, where conflict between the taller people and more aggressive invaders was followed by interbreeding. The account distinguishes sharply between the consequences for the two species: a human woman carrying a Taltos child usually miscarried and died, while repeated mating over many years depleted the eggs of a female Taltos. Some unions produced Taltos with human genes, humans carrying Taltos genes, and malformed offspring; over time, these outcomes became the material of superstition and legend.

From Ancestry to Inheritance

Taltos ancestry did not remain a remote genealogical curiosity. The inherited genes could be carried by humans and, in some cases, later give rise to a Taltos or a malformed child. The history therefore connects May Day’s ancestral union to the reproductive vulnerability and uncertainty that recur in the account of the species.

The Mayfair Legacy formalized the family’s continuity through rules of name, residence, and succession. A person had to retain the Mayfair name, even after marrying outside the family, to remain connected to the Legacy. The family’s one Heiress in each generation lived in the family house and was required to be able to bear children. These arrangements kept the clan close and, as Rowan explains, were accompanied by extensive interbreeding. In this way, inherited ancestry and a deliberately maintained family structure became intertwined.

The Family’s Taltos Connection

The family’s inherited connection culminates in the revelation that Rowan’s child was a human-Taltos mixture. Rowan describes the child as having been about five months into gestation when Lasher entered the infant and caused it to grow rapidly. The episode makes the Mayfair genealogy consequential in the present: the line’s history of carrying Taltos genes is bound to a pregnancy, a birth, and the family’s accumulated knowledge of Lasher.

The account also explains why Taltos birth and early nurture carry such high stakes. A Taltos infant unfolds as a small adult and begins maturing immediately. It needs its mother’s milk to develop properly; without it in the first hour after birth, it risks permanent stunting, while nursing and the mother’s telepathic nurture can bring it to its usual full height—about six and a half feet—within that hour. The same account stresses the heavy toll on the mother. These details place the Mayfair inheritance not only in the abstract language of genes and succession, but in the practical demands imposed on mothers and children.

Historical Meaning

May Day functions as a point of origin within a history repeatedly shaped by concealment. After wars and massacres, the Taltos were scattered and hid among humans, concealing their birthing rites; mixed ancestry and family legends helped obscure the boundary between the species. The Mayfair line is one outcome of that history, not an isolated exception to it.

The inherited connection also sits uneasily beside the Legacy’s language of family continuity. The Mayfair rules preserve a name, a house, and an Heiress, while Taltos ancestry makes reproduction a source of danger as well as succession. The remembered May Day union thus binds a celebratory date to a lineage whose later history is governed by both inherited possibility and the bodily costs of carrying it.